I'm pretty much on pace* to reach 52 by the end of this year, and by golly I read a real tough one.Wuthering Heights is basically a very good book about truly awful people. They are either born awful or simply turned awful by being in the presence of other awful people. Some people think the the romance between Heathcliff and Catherine was something deep and profound. I think "obsessive-compulsive" is a more apt term, so much so that it drove them to hurt and/or kill everyone around them thanks to their single-mindedness. And I haven't even mentioned the part about graves.
Did I like the book? Actually, I did! Most reactions I got to "hey, I'm reading Wuthering Heights!" included "Ugh!", "Why??", "Don't!!!" and "Heathcliff is a stalker" (thanks, Mom). It's a dark one and should not be confused with works such as Jane Eyre or anything by Jane Austen (which is actually a poor comparison as this came much later). There is a lot of lit-crit about this book, but the opening essay was all I really needed to understand the background of the book and where much of the nastiness comes from. Also, this book was quite a bit easier a read for me than Pride and Prejudice, which I took on a couple years back, I think because the language of the Victorian era is a bit closer to our own than that of the Romantic era. I'm not an English major; I'm just throwing that out there!
Up next, Michael Connelly's latest, The Gods of Guilt. I can't just read old books, you know.
* - I actually wrote this Saturday and only now realized I didn't publish! Book 3 is well underway at this point!
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